Teaching Environmental Law with Impact

This post is part of a series related to Teaching Environmental Law in Context, a recent book by Member Scholars Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez.

At the 2026 Law & Society Annual Conference, I participated in a roundtable discussion about Teaching Environmental Law in Context — both the new book by Member Scholars Carmen Gonzalez and Rebecca Bratspies and the activity of teaching environmental law to law students in tumultuous times for the field.

I have taught environmental law at the University of Kansas School of Law for all but two of the last 15 years, and I have never taught it in exactly the same way twice. I’m always adjusting my approach — adding the most current events, looking for new ways to teach the wide range of complex topics to help students build skills, and supporting students to understand both the environmental law statutes and the pollution problems they are designed to address.

In short, a book like this — with its focus on creative and impactful ways to reach students in the dense field of environmental law — is my kind of book.

I focused my comments at the roundtable on the chapters on the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, better known as RCRA, which is the nation’s most prominent waste statute. Both are complex statutes coupled with even more complex regulations that are highly specific to regulated industries. At the same time, unlike some of the other statutes in the book, these are statutes that touch on every person’s daily life — the air we breathe and the waste we produce each day are covered by these laws.

Before turning to each individually, I want to highlight two overarching observations.

The first is that the book aligns well with the instincts of many students new to the study of environmental law, and this is powerful because it will help instructors meet students where they are. Alternatively, it will push those students with less developed critical thinking skills to understand the significance of policy choices embedded within statutory regimes.

In the Clean Air Act chapter, the authors suggest impactful starting points for discussion on general and specific topics. At the very opening of discussion, for example, they highlight how many times we breathe per minute — 16 times for adults, 40-60 for infants. They ask students, do you think breathing clean air is a right that belongs to everyone?

Another example I appreciate from later in the chapter in the context of non-attainment areas: They pose the question: why doesn’t the CAA simply ban new sources of pollution in non-attainment zones?

Questions like these provide powerful framing for studying the many compromises represented in the Clean Air Act’s structure. They also help underscore the key point that the Clean Air Act wasn’t enacted against the backdrop of a pre-industrial landscape — it was a response to the excesses of an industrial landscape that was highly polluting and an effort to curb those harms.

There was courage in the consensus of Congress in the early 1970s that we haven’t seen in a long time, and it made a major difference for public health. I appreciate how the book looks for opportunities to uplift the achievements of environmental law.At the same time, the book helps students come to understand the challenges Congress overcame in achieving that consensus and appreciate its imperfections and their long shadow.

A second general observation is the tendency in teaching environmental law to which this book responds — that is, “to immerse students in complex legal analysis, arcane regulatory schemes, and landmark cases from the distant past.” Of course, if we want students to succeed as environmental attorneys, there is no way around the fact that they need the skills that can come from that immersion. At the same time — and this is what’s important — that immersion can easily leave students unmoored from the real-world contexts that give them meaning. This is why place-based study can be so beneficial.

Turning to the Clean Air Act and RCRA chapters specifically, I’ll highlight a couple of the exercises I see as especially impactful.

In the Clean Air Act chapter, there is an exercise related to National Ambient Air Quality Standards that helps students relate to the challenge of standard setting from the agency perspective. This is an innovative approach, providing students with information — a list of data points, essentially — regarding a pollutant and its impacts. The exercise then challenges students to decide what “constitutes an adequate margin of safety, how to navigate scientific uncertainty, and the role of risk assessment and precaution in determining whether a standard is legally defensible under Section 109” — “requisite to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety.”

In the RCRA chapter, the authors recommend asking students to keep a waste diary for a day. This helps students think about the national/global waste problem in a way that is personal — underscoring how easy it is to think of waste as thrown “away,” as if “away” is not just near someone else.

The book highlights RCRA as an opportunity for at least a brief introduction to comparative environmental law, contrasting RCRA with the EU’s Extended Producer Liability Directives or Germany’s Packaging Act. RCRA is also a great statute for place-based study. For example, it can be impactful to center study on a local landfill and state-based standards under Subtitle D’s cooperative federalism structure for managing municipal waste.

In one of the exercises, they zero in on a key distinction and tension within RCRA — whether to characterize something as a “waste” or a product that has a continuing use. They use an exercise on the proper disposal of e-cigarettes as an example, and there are some good cases one can use to reinforce this, as well as the significance of the determination of whether a waste is “hazardous” or “nonhazardous.”

The environmental justice dimensions of these statutes and their limitations are also a central theme in both chapters, considering hog farms in North Carolina, the chemical industry in Louisiana, and concentrations of waste facilities in disadvantaged communities.

It can be challenging to teach environmental law in ways that support students to develop key legal skills, think critically, and stay engaged even when the material is dense. Succeeding in doing so is essential to the next generation of excellent environmental attorneys. Teaching Environmental Law in Context is a contribution toward that goal.